How Letting Go of Disillusionment Made Room For My Brady Bunch Style Happily Ever After

Sometimes the fantasy you have as a child really comes true.

A Very Brady Renovation debuts on HGTV tonight. I intend to be in front of the tv. Possibly with popcorn.

If you don’t watch the network devoted to remodeling, building, or choosing homes, you may not know about this show.

HGTV made headlines last summer when it was revealed to be the winning bidder on the Studio City home that provided the iconic facade in the 1970s sitcom. Though there wasn’t initially a clear idea of what the network would do with the building, programmers quickly attracted the six surviving stars of The Brady Bunch to participate in a renovation series to replicate the set’s midcentury aesthetic inside the house. HGTV’s ‘A Very Brady Renovation’ Inspires Specials on Food Network, Discovery (Exclusive)

A few things of note here:

• The only part of this house to appear on The Brady Bunch was the outside. The interiors were all shot inside a studio.
• This house (was) one story. Strangely, the interior of the house on the show was a two-story. It had an attic that became a room for one of the kids. The weirdest thing about that was I never remember thinking about this fact as I watched it.
• There was a fun X Files episode featuring the house. The “Sunshine Days” episode was near the end of the 9th season. It told a fun story of a fan with supernatural powers who lived in the house. Wikipedia says the critics gave it mixed reviews. I give it five stars. Those critics must not have grown up wishing their lives were more like The Brady Brunch.

I fell into the group of children who wished their lives were more like Marcia’s. Who would want to be Jan, if they could be Marsha? I’m more a Jan in real life, but we are talking fantasy.

My own life was full of too much reality. I don’t remember the moment I became disillusioned. I must have been so young it seemed normal to accept things as they came.

There were always surprises, of course, but nothing where I expected a lot more than I got. I grew up thinking I wouldn’t get married. The marriages I saw, I wanted no part of.

Until one day I was laying in bed with my boyfriend and he asked me to marry him. I surprised both of us by saying yes. It was a leap of faith, but I didn’t change overnight. I was still planning my life so that it went in the direction I wanted.

The big change was that now I was planning with someone else and we were doing it together. And then my urine turned blue (it was a cup back then, not a stick) and life changed. Life changed a lot.

He swore he was in it for the long haul. A baby was exactly what would make our life perfect. That was the moment. It wasn’t getting married, it was trusting him enough to have a baby.

I bought it. I went all in. We had the baby and exchanged our condo for a three-bedroom house. We lived life. Careers built, our baby grew, and I wanted another baby.

We had trouble conceiving at that time. Not a lot of trouble. Work stress made my eggs uncooperative.

I planned to quit my job to stay home once pregnant. When it didn’t happen on schedule, I resigned anyway. The stick (it was a stick this time) turned blue within a month.

Soon we were a family of four with a cat and a dog. I was a Girl Scout leader. Our eldest daughter was in school and our youngest was getting potty trained. Life felt good. On our tenth anniversary, I exhaled.

Intellectually I know that my exhalation didn’t cause what happened. In retrospect, it is easy to see the signs of unhappiness in my ex-husband. At the time, his disconnected, impatient behavior seemed out of the blue.

When his infidelity was uncovered, it felt like a knife wound in my soul. I told him at the time, “I feel as though you’ve killed me.”

He thought that was over the top, “No one has died here.”

No person had died, true. Something inside me shifted, though. It felt like a death. It was the death of my illusions.

My belief in him. That he would never cheat, never harm me. My complete trust in him was lying on the pavement with a police marked outline around it.

“How did this happen?” I asked over and over. Usually alone in my room, after the kids were asleep, with a glass of wine.

Two years later I surprised myself by letting someone else in. The secret to healing from the death of illusions seems to be hope. Once you allow hope to inch in, the pain fades and sometimes there is room to take a chance again.

I did it. To be fair, so did my husband. We both had former marriages and baggage from our pasts we were trying to leave behind.

Unlike the parents in The Brady Bunch, we didn’t get married first. We got a house and moved in. Although we wanted and hoped everything would work out, we didn’t sign a marriage license until a year later.

Almost without believing it, suddenly my life was a lot like Carol Brady’s. I came to the marriage with girls (two) and he came to the marriage with a boy (1). We all lived in a great, two-story house.

We live in the Phoenix area, not Southern California. We have three kids, not six. Our dog count was two, not one.

The important things, though, were a lot like that fantasy life I watched when I was seven. That life I thought I’d never have.

Sometimes you have to pick up your hope and dust it off. Kick the disillusionment to the curb and go for it. If you do, you might get your own version of The Brady Bunch.

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